21.2.16

Now that all of my negatives edited are filed (sort of) they form an archive which I guess one day will be rendered useless, unable to print, or scan, with no idea what the new photographic medium will be.. There is something very satifying about having an archive all in one place, something that just isn't really possible with the digital era. In fact yesterday my brother in-law told me I should store my images in The Cloud. I have never heard of anything that sounds so image un-safe.

One thing I am most pleased about is that there seems to be a lot more interest in physical prints recently. I even had to dust off the old 11/14" folio and get a few prints made to bring it up to date.. Who knows, maybe I will book some darkroom space and get out my dodging kit..

17.2.16

The story of inequality is impossible to ignore these days. My morning commute through Manhattan affords me glimpses of both appalling poverty and magnificent wealth. Everyone from billionaire businessmen to the Pope has spoken out against this troubling development.

While
we may think we understand wealth through television and tabloids, what
we see represents only a drop in the bucket. In 2014, the highest paid
athlete in the world, Floyd Mayweather, made $105 million. In the same year, the highest paid hedge fund manager in the world, Kenneth Griffin, made $1.3 billion.
And yet Mayweather is world famous, while for most people Griffin
doesn’t register at all. And while we may think we understand
inequality, in fact we don’t at all. Harvard Business School asked
Americans how much they think major CEOs earn relative to ordinary
workers. The median respondent thought the ratio was perhaps 30 to 1.
The reality? It's over to 350 to 1.

There
is a long history of photography denouncing poverty, such as Jacob
Riis’ photos from 19th century New York slums or Mary Ellen Mark’s
photos of Seattle’s homeless children. But recent decades have witnessed
a boom in strong photography questioning privilege. Consider Jim
Goldberg’s "Rich and Poor" shot in San Francisco, or Lauren Greenfield’s
"kids + money" shot in Los Angeles.

In curating 1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality,
I have tried to gather images that examine wealth globally and in many
different ways. One reference point I had for my project was Edward
Steichen's 1955 exhibition The Family of Man. Curated
in the optimistic postwar era, it presented over 500 documentary photos
of very different people from around the world, grouped under common
themes such as family, religion and work. It
argued for, in Steichen’s words, "the essential oneness of mankind". But
as inequality reaches historic levels, I find this thesis less and less
viable. Consider, for example, that the 6 heirs to the Walmart fortune
own more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined.I wanted to respond to Steichen’s project by finding images on similar themes but taken in the realm of wealth. While The Family of Man
was a sprawling, varied and democratic mix of images by both known and
unknown photographers, I took a different approach, befitting the
exclusive spirit of my topic. I selected a small number of
polished, well-crafted, medium format photographs by some of today’s
best photographers. I wanted to borrow the language of privilege and use
it to observe and critique privilege.

Some of the images map out points in the world of affluence, such as education, leisure and healthcare (while avoiding clichés like fur coats and private jets). Other
images are positioned outside the world of the 1%, looking back in. For
example, one of Nina Berman’s images shows a crowd of hopefuls
attending a church in the American South that teaches that Jesus wants
us to be rich. Some images contain juxtapositions of class, such as
Guillaume Bonn’s photo of maids in a wealthy Kenyan household. Still
other images are more abstract, such as Sasha Bezzubov’s photo of a
cloud of golden dust over a logging road in Gabon, which evokes for me
the ephemeral nature of wealth.

In March 2015,
billionaire private equity investor Paul Tudor Jones II publicly
declared that the wealth gap “cannot and will not persist...it
will get closed. History always does it. It typically happens in one of
three ways: either through revolution, higher taxes, or wars.”

7.2.16

Originally I was going to keep this projects under wraps in an attempt to create some kind of Blair Witch type internet frenzy. But now I think its time to show what I have been up to. Heres a statement of sorts;

People who
know me predominately as a landscape photographer may think of this
project as a departure from my work. However, my early interests in
photography came about
through sculptured forms such as nudes and various still life objects
and has always been a sideline to my work. If you combine this with my
interest in the beauty of decay often seen in my landscapes, its easy to
see the transition.

I have long
had a fascination with animal curiosities, be it taxidermy, creatures
suspended in formaldehyde, skeletons and in this case the skull itself.
Memories of
trips to the local museum on a rainy day in the summer holidays are
something I still hold dear with its glass boxes full of interesting and
exciting beasts.

The actual
idea for the Calvariams series started after seeing an image of a pet cat
skull. With its big eye sockets and teeth, it looked liked some kind of
alien monster,
and not some cute fluffy kitten. Intrigued I began looking at other
animals skulls and became fascinated at the way different species looked
in their afterlife..

The zoology
department at the Grant university has the largest collection of animal
skulls in the UK. They very kindly allowed me access and I cannot thank
them enough
as with out them this series would not exist.

As a
photographer this project is very much about the striking visual form
and textures of a skull as an object. But I soon became interested in
the animals themselves
and there genetic make up; For example, seeing the size of a crocodiles
brain cavity, which is about the size of a peanut simply because it is a
predator and does not need a large brain to function.

Several of
the skulls in the project are from animals now sadly considered
endangered or even extinct such as the Tasmanian Tiger. Although I have
tried to keep the edit
very much on a visual aesthetic, when you know something is no longer
around or very rare, you kind of want it in the show..

The visual
impulse for such a project was to shoot the skulls from the front or the
side. But I had seen this many times before including Irving Penns
wonderful Cranium
Architecture series.

Choosing to
to shoot the skulls from above was a bit of a risk as I was unsure how
certain skulls would look having only seen them from the side and front
in the museum
catalogue. It can be tricky to go against your first instincts, but one
thing I have learnt with landscape photography is that the best images
are often not what your eyes see first.

I
deliberately chose not to give any scale to the images so you could be
looking at a skull which in reality only measures a few inches.

I like to
think of the final images as being similar to Inkblots. They can be
interpreted visually in different ways depending on the individual.